The U.S. Postal Service said Tuesday it will delay the closure or consolidation of thousands of post offices across the country in response to requests from lawmakers who said Congress first needs to pass legislation to overhaul the cash-strapped mail agency.

Post offices and mail-processing facilities will not be closed or merged with nearby locations until May 15 at the earliest. But officials said they plan to continue reviewing the fates of thousands of post offices in the coming months, hoping to resume the closures once Congress approves legislation to reform the system.

“Given the Postal Service’s financial situation and the loss of mail volume, the (agency) must continue to take all steps necessary to reduce costs and increase revenue,” USPS said in a statement Tuesday.

As part of plans to cut $20 billion in costs by 2015, the Postal Service has proposed closing more than 3,700 post offices and about 250 mail-processing facilities. It also hopes to end Saturday mail deliveries, slow the delivery of first-class mail and change labor-union contracts to possibly cut as many as 120,000 jobs.

Postal officials say the changes need to occur quickly to keep the delivery service solvent, but Tuesday’s move slows the process by five months.

In Colorado, processing facilities in Alamosa, Colorado Springs, Durango and Salida have been targeted for closure, as have 63 of the state’s 390 post offices.

More in News

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.

Wednesday morning two independent research teams, one based in the Netherlands and the other in California, reported that the deluge from Hurricane Harvey was significantly heavier than it would have been before the era of human-caused global warming.

Denver’s newest skyscraper will be home to one of the city’s most recognizable home-grown business by the end of next year. Chipotle is moving its 450 downtown corporate staff into the 1144 Fifteenth tower by the end of 2018.